On a brisk fall afternoon in mid-September, Yugi stopped on his way home from school and sent a text message around the world, reading Hey, how is everything going?

Geography entails, however, that a brisk fall afternoon in Japan is simultaneously a dry, cloudless early morning in upper Egypt, and Marik Ishtar slept until noon so habitually that every morning Rishid refilled the kettle and set the timer to 11:50. So it was not for several hours, as the sun pitched itself to such a height that even Marik, who had since he was small slept in nightless rooms where the gas lamps stayed on at all hours, had to wince at the light pouring in from the window and open his eyes, that he blearily wrote back.

do u mean in general or the hostage situation

He didn't notice the timestamp until afterward, and his expression soured. Stupid idiot loser. Now you made it weird by answering so late.

Marik's bathroom (which was His bathroom, and en suite, because when they'd moved in last year Marik called dibs on the biggest bedroom and no one objected, even though it would probably make more sense for Rishid to get it since he's the oldest, or Ishizu since she was on the mortgage and needed the office space more, but Marik Ishtar got what he asked for even when he did not deserve it) was lined with dozens of bottles and tubes which were always used fastidiously at designated times in a specific order, and all of which purported to improve, perfect, cleanse, remove, cover, or any number of other verbs as applied to any feature or other malady suffered as a consequence of being human. He glanced at a contact lens case and wrinkled his nose, and reached for one of many eyeliner pencils.

There are so few things about yourself that are within your control. It is fortunate, then, that who you actually are almost never matters. People act on the idea of you they've built in their heads, not the real one. You cannot control this either, or he couldn't anymore, but it could be nudged in a particular direction.

He heard his phone vibrate in the other room and dreaded looking at it.

Friendship involves so many unwritten rules. He wanted them all to like him so much and he didn't know how to vivisect anyone's brains to figure out the right buttons to press. He was convinced that if he made even the tiniest slip-up then everyone would suddenly snap out of it, remember all the terrible things he'd done to them and decide they didn't want anything to do with him anymore.

Marik remembered a few times when he was younger, vaguely, after they'd escaped to the surface, when he'd seen other kids at a park or on the street and wanted to play with them. Rishid had always gently dissuaded him. Said they had more important work to do with the god cards, and that he should focus, or insist that Rishid would play with him instead, or claim that Marik was simply too smart or too good and would find all those other kids boring. Lies and machinations. He'd been trying to spare them the rod, avoid the fact that little Marik had been unfit, too dangerous for friends. Had to make sure no one cheated at hopscotch and ended up a brainless, hollow-eyed zombie.

Marik shuddered and dispensed with the thought, because feeling guilty about horrible things you never did because Rishid prevented you from doing them wasn't being very grateful to all the effort Rishid put into stopping you. It really just puts it to waste.

Then again, he wasn't supposed to dispense with thoughts anymore, right? That was the problem, the whole reason he was in this mess. There could be no dispensing with all the thoughts he hated having, because if you don't have them even though you hate them then they all end up in a pile somewhere and fester until they turn into a monster that kills your dad and leaves three people comatose.

So Marik let the thought come back, and grit his teeth, and sat with the ghastly weight of every awful thing he'd ever done, or could have done, or thought about doing, and that he was a monster who ruined people for fun and tried to destroy his own family. He took a deep breath, and wrapped a hand around the towel rack so hard he feared he might rip it off the wall, and sat with it, and then he let it go.

No wonder he was so unqualified for this, or for having any sort of peer-to-peer interaction that didn't involve giving orders or receiving adulation. It was a miracle he'd managed everything this long. It was already a miracle every time Marik Ishtar got out of bed in the morning.

Getting better fucking sucks.

You have to, though. It's go forward or go back, but there's no leaving the path.

"This is the fate of every human being."

Yugi's responding message read Both? :). He followed it up a few seconds later with wait is the hostage you or him

Also I am running a MW one shot next week and since anzu is overseas for auditions we're doing it online this time! Let me know if you want to play and I will send you the chargen rules. It's only a handful of us but I thought bakura needed a lift and he's really excited to be a player for once and I knew you wanted to try it too

The bakura here I mean

Your bakura should probably not play?

Yugi was not usually a triple-texter, but with Marik's timezone so far behind they all had a habit of just leaving him messages in piles. Jonouchi had sent him a meme sometime last night. Marik didn't understand the joke but he pressed the heart button anyway.

"Bakura!" Marik announced, with a smile that might as well wear hazard tape, planting his arm in front of Bakura's face and leaning in on the table to get in the way of everything.

"I don't care."

"You haven't even heard what it is yet."

"Busy." He continued to read around Marik's arm.

Marik acted like he hadn't heard a word. "I have decided," he continued, "that we should—"

"Do you know what 'busy' means?" He did not know what Marik wanted, but his sinking sense of dread said he didn't want to find out.

Marik had been ignoring him for days, probably still steaming about that you-would-stab-your-family comment, and Bakura was returning the favor. He had settled into the background of the household like a phantom, coming and going as he pleased and ravaging the kitchen at odd hours. He was certain they wouldn't throw him out, though apparently no one intended to meaningfully constrain him. This seemed like a piss poor way to "supervise" a dangerous and unrepentant enemy of the state, if you asked him. Insulting, maybe? Like they just believed him when he said he wasn't going to hurt any of them. Which he wasn't, but he could. When you almost destroy the world twice and kill a lot of people you'd think you deserve a respectable level of fear and loathing. Outsmarting them all wouldn't be any fun if they weren't even trying. It must be so difficult for the pharaoh to find good help these days.

Patience, patience. The lambs will bring themselves to slaughter.

Marik's mouth did the furious little twitch of someone who wasn't used to being ignored and didn't like it very much. "It is important. And you are doing the same thing you do every day." He finally removed his hand from the table so Bakura could see the whole page.

Marik wasn't wrong. The table was covered with books. All Bakura had done, for days, was read by the stack. Thick, complicated tomes, all in Japanese, seemingly a new one every day. They collected around him like condensation and Bakura devoured them obsessively, dog-earing pages and scribbling in margins for what one could only assume was some diabolical purpose.

Marik was about to say something else when his eye caught something across the room, lost his thought upon realizing that something about his kitchen wasn't right. "The cat didn't eat." he observed, to no one in particular.

"It won't come in when I am here." Bakura didn't look up. "It hates me."

"Wepset's friendly."

"Your tiny savage hell-creature is most certainly not friendly. I have to lock the door at night lest it try to maul me each morning."

"You poor thing. You must live in terror." Somehow his sad little tone did not communicate any genuine sympathy. "I'm sure you could take her. She is very small."

"It's the principle. She has claws."

Marik laughed exactly once. "Maybe it's because you're undead." He grinned, unserious, Marik's perpetual state of Schrödinger's mocking-you. "That's what happens in movies, isn't it? Animals know."

Bakura looked up from his book, slowly, as if actually considering this, and knit his brows and frowned. "This is not a movie," he said, after a second, "and I am alive."

"As far as we know." Marik said, with a smirk that was physically tiny but existed more as a sort of palpable aura of satisfaction that came off of him in waves, the way it galvanized him when he finally said something that locked in your attention. "What are you even reading?" he asked, leaning down to invade Bakura's personal space once again.

"Never you mind." he said, rapidly attempting to backtrack this engagement.

"Come on." he said, and snatched it right out of Bakura's hands.

"'EY! GIVE THAT BACK, YOU-"

Marik elbowed him backwards and leveraged his superior height to keep it out of reach, knowing he had only seconds, and scanned with curiosity the god-knows-what that Bakura had been possessed by for the past week. A dense diatribe on something abstract, pedagogies and paradigms, "superstructure" underlined four times in pen.

Bakura ripped the book out of his hands and clutched the dingy paperback protectively to his chest. "Can you mind your own damn business?!"

"No." Marik was already flipping through the other books on the table, skimming pages and reading spines. A great deal of history, dead kings and deader kingdoms, eight-word titles with longer subtitles on abstract and theoretical fare. Names like Epicurus, Engels, Pisarev, Nietzsche, notes on high treason and Politics as a Vocation. "Where did you get all of this?"

"It is called a bookstore, Marik." he huffed. "They sell books. You can buy them."

"A bookstore, in Luxor," he said, with rising skepticism at each point, "that sells political theory exclusively in Japanese?"

"They'll order whatever you want, if you ask for it and pay them import fees."

"You can afford that?"

"I have ways to afford anything that I want." Bakura sat down again and shortly started glancing at spines and carefully restacking them; evidently Marik had upset some kind of order.

"You steal from people to buy textbooks?" he asked, a laugh in his voice.

Bakura couldn't tell if he was being made fun of again. "It's redistribution!" he said. "I am democratizing access to knowledge for the masses."

"By stealing from the masses."

"I am also the masses." Bakura crossed his arms and leaned his chair back to balance on only the last two legs. "I am interested in...greater consciousness. That which moves the world."

"Like the gods?"

"No, greater than that. Gods do not impress me. I had a god, and he was able to beat all the other ones easily. Gods are beneath me."

"What do you mean, you had a god?"

"Yes, I made a god and he was powerful and unbeatable and made of snakes and you should be in awe of me. He is dead now, irrelevant. So—"

"Made of what?"

"What I am interested in, after you so recently pointed out that I have 3,000 years of catching up to do," he continued, "are structures. Greater than gods. Greater than civilizations. That which we create without purpose and sustain without seeing, the way fish do not see water."

Marik flipped through a random hardcover. "Nothing gets bigger than civilizations without a purpose. It has to serve someone."

"To perpetuate itself is purpose enough, for that which is mindless. It's enough for humans."

"It's not. Humans need a purpose too." Marik squinted at a page. "Why are you writing in code?"

"Eh?"

"Your notes are gibberish." he said. "Why is this all katakana? Are you—" Marik blinked, and then snorted. Bakura had solved the problem of illiteracy in his native language by clumsily stuffing Egyptian into someone else's syllabary, sound by sound, all while violently intermingling vocabulary between the two. Still gibberish to Marik, between that and Bakura's handwriting, but probably decipherable eventually if you had two dictionaries and a lot of time. "Forget it." Marik tossed the book unceremoniously on the pile and made an exasperated noise. "We are getting back to my thing now."

Bakura made a face, and the utmost ceremony and sarcasm announced, "Okay, Marik. What is it you would like to waste my time with?"

Marik stood up straight. "It is Thursday, which means it is nearly the weekend. And cool and popular teens like us do not spend the weekends sitting around reading books." He pounded a fist in his other hand for emphasis. "We do cool things, like go to movies and rock concerts."

"You're popular?"

"Shut up."

"And cool? Because I have seen scant evidence of either, so it is very bold of you to assert—"

"I included you, fool!"

"You did, but of course I'm cool and popular, I'm not disputing that, it's—"

"It's not like you have anything better to do."

"You don't know that. Also, you hate me. Why do you want to spend time with me now?"

Marik grit his teeth. "Your horrific and insensitive remarks," he said, "have not been forgotten. But I have realized that the deluge of profanity that comes out of your mouth is not completely within your control. So—"

"Do you just not have any other friends?"

"I have lots of friends." he seethed. "I am taking pity on you. Since you'd be on the street if it weren't for me, I would think you'd be more grateful."

"Marik, are you attempting to ransom my access to food and shelter on agreeing to run around doing stupid inanities with you? That is very desperate for Mr. Cool And Popular."

Marik did not respond immediately. Bakura looked at his face and expected him to be broiling, but to his surprise the insults had ceased to take effect (which was disappointing because Bakura considered them very good insults). Instead Marik was studying him again, calm and curious with his particular surgical glare. "...You're different now." he said.

"I'm what?"

"You were different in Battle City." He stated it with complete confidence, looking Bakura up and down, from the white hair across his shoulders to the chosen-because-it-looked-cool-and-no-other-reason band logo on his shirt to the stacks of books on the table. "You were more..." He thought for a second. "Gullible." he settled on, a little disappointed. He looked like he had more adjectives in mind but was deciding to hide them. "You talk like you have a brain." His nose twitched. "Not that you make any sense. But different."

"I have always 'had a brain.'" he reproached.

He shook his head. "You're different. I can tell."

"I am exactly as I've always been." he insisted, and then muttered, "It's the other one who was different."

This caught Marik's attention. "...Other one?"

"Infested and servile." Bakura waved a hand dismissively and reached for his book, in a bid to end the conversation. "He had someone else in his head, and it was making him very stupid."

"…Ryou Bakura?"

"No, idiot, not my host, I was just—" Bakura's brain went around something again. "Out of sorts. Are you going to bother me all day?"

"Yes." Marik's affect was flat, and he tapped his perfect nails on the table. "Everyone has agreed to stop killing each other, I have generously decided to forgive you for being an ass, and we can all get on with the business of being friends. That's how it works. You will cease being uncooperative now."

"Is this what you do? Just say things about people and expect them to act like you're right? I am not your friend." he said. "You do not get to single-handedly determine everything we do."

"Fine." Marik crossed his arms and spoke as though in significant pain. "What do you want to do?"

"…What?"

"What," Marik said, "do you think would be fun?" He did not sound like he particularly wanted or cared about the answer, but he asked.

Bakura's face blanked, because this wasn't a question he'd been prepared for, and also because so much of his life had been dedicated to bare survival, and after that his life had consisted of being jewelry, so the answer was not readily at hand. He skipped over the obvious answers like "stealing" and "iconoclasm" and "plotting the painful deaths of my enemies." The troubled sequence that ended up coming out of his mouth was "Games. Models. Thinking. Dead stuff. Paints? Knives. High places. Uh,"

"Thinking is not a hobby." Marik said, which just confirmed to Bakura that Marik didn't spend enough time doing it, at least not properly. "What does 'dead stuff' mean?"

"There's a lot of skulls in the desert, if you go looking for them. Animals and stuff. Some of them are interesting or weird."

"That's," Marik paused, "sort of cool, actually." He shook his head. "Let's stick with games." Marik turned swiftly to leave the kitchen.

"Hold on, I didn't say I was going anywhere with you!"

"Come oooon, I even let you pick!"

"You did not—" Bakura made a face, which went to war with a different kind of face, before finally conceding. "Fine. If it will make you shut up for once."

Marik's eyes lit up like electric lights, or little purple supernovas, or like a small child who had just dug out a new toy from the bottom of a cereal box and was now victoriously holding it aloft the way a warlord holds the bleeding decapitated head of a hated enemy. It was a source of fascination to Bakura how often Marik managed to be both at the same time. "Good." he said, and turned to go again. "And you have to explain what 'made of snakes' means."

Bakura left his book on the counter next to one of Rishid's houseplants, though evidently he was becoming lax in their care. Half the leaves on this side, he noticed, were starting to curl in and turn brown.

In a dimly lit hideout with an empty throne, a handful of broken toys sat in a semi-circle. There were only a handful of Ghouls left. Maybe five or six, some with masks and some without, with pockets full of cards of dubious origin. They wore their old cowls, with a few noticeable changes—the chains had been removed, and someone had taken a black marker to the eye symbol that emblazoned the hoods and drawn a prominent letter X through every one.

"I say we go for it." said one, about a known collection of super rares set to be transported next week.

"No, you're not listening." insisted the other. "There's too much security."

"We've pulled off better." said someone else.

"Yeah? When we could wave a magic wand and make anyone hand over anything?"

"He's right, we'll get caught before we get anywhere close."

"Who put him in charge?"

"No one's in charge." said yet another, helpfully. "We're democratic."

"That's because no one could agree on who would be in charge!"

"That's what democracy is, isn't it?"

"'S what I'm saying, no one's in charge, so he can't go around acting like he's..." He trailed off, not wanting to give a name. "Like he's the leader."

The near-invocation made everyone a little more tense.

"…I miss Pandora. He was smart. He'd know what to do."

"Like he'd be much help? Pandora thought our prospects were so dim he offed himself."

"Pandora didn't off himself."

"Okay, fine, what would you calling putting a sawblade to your own—"

"He didn't off himself. He killed himself because someone went and made him want to kill himself."

At that the conversation crashed into a deafening silence. This was not a statement anyone could prove.

Nobody liked the term "made you want to." It was incomplete, a clumsy attempt to describe acts for which "I wanted to" wasn't right but "Someone made me" wasn't correct either. The past few years of their lives encompassed different terms, occupied the fuzzy, inarticulate space between devotion and duress.

The words for that, if they existed, needed to be prettier, and to hold a lot more ugliness. To be a little piece of something greater, to know with such perfect certainty that something greater exists at all; to know that god walks the earth as a young man draped in gold and purple velvet, who sees through your eyes and speaks with your tongue, and how you did everything willingly because you believed it, but whether or not to believe it wasn't a choice you had in the matter.

"Well," said one, finally breaking the silence, "he's no use to us now."

"...You are all," said someone else, quiet up until now, a voice that couldn't decide between laughing and seething with contempt, "worthless. Going after more cards when we should be going after—"

"You're on this again?" came the response, cutting him off. "Look, we've got a good thing going. Cards are still selling, and they'll go even faster if they release that new disk like the rumors say. I don't see why we'd jeopardize a solid operation on your—"

"So that's it, then? We just give up, let it go? This isn't a 'solid operation,' it's a bunch of—"

"We are letting it go! You're the only one with the problem! You want to waste time tracking down someone we don't need anymore?"

"We all have," he said, "the same problem."

A human soul is persistent, unyielding, in large part indestructible. It is no small thing, to have a little piece of someone else in you, like a rock in your shoe, a kernel stuck between the teeth. Are you ever really going to forget it's there? There is nothing to do but keep poking at it until your gums bleed, and wash your mouth out over and over again no matter how much it stings.

"Know what I think?" he continued, "I think you're all scared. You think you're going to see him and turn into a drooling stooge again, is that it?" They answered him only with silence. "I'm not afraid of any sniveling brat. He's going to get what's coming to him. He doesn't have any power over us anymore."

Everyone shifted uncomfortably. This was the rhetoric they had all adopted, to be sure. It was not clear how many in the room really believed it.